Windows recovery partition with GRUB2
- by Actorclavilis
So I recently got a new Toshiba laptop and installed Ubuntu 12.04 on it. Since it is a "Windows 7 Enabled" machine or some other proprietary nonsense like that, a few hardware features are designed only to work with W7. Eventually I found a way to enable these hardware functions by booting into the W7 recovery disc; however, they sporadically stop working. I'm moderately surprised that I was able to get anything to work at all, so I don't especially want to spend more time fixing the problems in a different fashion. Now I don't actually own the recovery disc; it's my father's. Since it's a pain to have to go asking for the disc every time the features stop working, I made an image of the disc and was hoping to make a 'recovery' partition like some computers have. However, unetbootin and GRUB2 both want a kernel and initrd to point to on startup, and something like
set root=(hd0,1)
loopback lo /w7r.iso
set root=(lo)
chainloader +1
in the spirit of the makeactive/ chainloader +1 commands that I used to use to dual-boot Linux and Windows simply gives me a file-not-found error.
My question, therefore, is: Is it possible to, having written a Windows iso to a partition (such as with dd if=w7r.iso of=/dev/sda4) to a partition, convince GRUB2 to boot from it?
Thanks in advance.
